25.10.14

DYLAN HOWE - Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie's Berlin

It is not
difficult to imagine the look of dismay on the faces of executives at RCA
Records when David Bowie delivered the tapes for Low in 1976. There’s no single. Can’t we have another ‘Rebel Rebel’,
or another ‘Fame’, please. As it happens they did get a hit with ‘Sound And
Vision’, a song in which David’s vocals don’t appear until about half way
through, but sales of Low can’t have
helped RCA’s balance sheet and the same probably goes for Heroes which followed a year later. Nowadays these two albums are
held up as cornerstones of Bowie’s catalogue, triumphs of art over commerce and
indicative of DB’s status as a visionary who was not only miles ahead of his
contemporaries but clever enough to see the lie of the land and switch
direction to avoid competing with the punks. Still, the song ‘Heroes’ aside, these
two records are a bit of a challenge, especially the instrumentals, which veer
from ethereal to downright depressing. Nowadays, of course, you can buy almost
all of Bowie’s instrumentals, dirges and otherwise, in one neat package as they
have been collected on an album called All
Saints, released in 2001. I’ve listened to it a lot over the years and find
it immensely satisfying, even though ‘Sense Of Doubt’ still brings on the
chills.

Now
along comes Dylan Howe with his interpretations of Bowie instrumentals on an
album called Subterranean: New Designs On
Bowie’s Berlin, another prospect that is unlikely to make a record company
salesman leap with joy. Dylan is a drummer cut from the same cloth as Bill
Bruford, the first drummer in Yes, his dad Steve’s band, who left that group to
pursue more challenging music with King Crimson and various jazz outfits and
also, eventually, to write a witty and very readable book about his career;
like Dylan, the exact opposite of those drummers in Spinal Tap who die in peculiar
ways. Amongst other things Dylan is the drummer with the current line-up of The
Blockheads and he also plays with Wilko Johnson, now fully recovered from
cancer according to reports, a mighty blessing indeed.

But Dylan’s real love is jazz,
and his interpretations of Bowie’s instrumental music leave no doubt about
this. Although there’s a touch of swing here and there, this is a
thought-provoking record, meandering, atmospheric and technically adroit,
especially Ross Stanley’s keyboards, both piano and synths, and Dylan’s own
drumming, his arrangements calling for all sorts of tricky time signatures that
you won’t find in rock. Indeed, the interpretations bear little resemblance to
Bowie’s originals and I was hard pressed to recognise them, even when I listened
to this album and Bowie’s All Saints
back to back.

The
tone is set by the opening ‘Subterraneans’, brooding, melancholy, late night
music, and sustained through the pacier ‘Weeping Wall’, while a lengthy take on
‘All Saints’, in which the whole band take turns to solo at one time or
another, sees them move more towards swing and free-form territory, with Brandon
Allen adding an ominous saxophone part. ‘Some Are’ is more refined, the tune
carried by Stanley’s melodic piano, which also leads the uplifting ‘Art
Decade’. ‘Neuköln’ is spliced between ‘Night’ and
‘Day’, mysteriously portraying the grimness of divided Berlin where Bowie made
his music after fleeing Los Angeles. With a hint of musique concrètehere
and there, it suggests the atmosphere of a deserted railway station in the
middle of the night, a dark and sinister place where agents of unfriendly
governments lurk in the shadows, more Harry Palmer than James Bond of course. ‘Warszawa’
evokes something similar, Adrian Utley’s sustained notes in the intro sounding
more like a cello than an electric guitar, Allen’s solo moving into John
Coltrane territory as the song opens out into full menacing flow. The
forbidding tone lifts for the closer, the wraithlike ‘Moss Garden’ on which
Dylan and Stanley are joined by Steve Howe whose koto adds an appropriate
Japanese touch to a floaty piece that eventually seems to drift off into the
breeze, like a kite carried away on a windy day. I
read somewhere that Dylan has been planning this record for seven years, just
three years less than the gap between David Bowie’s last two albums. I hope the
great man gets to hear it, for Subterranean
is a sincere tribute that grows on the ear every time I play it.